


before you start to hate yourself

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Depression, Eating Disorders, F/F, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 05:29:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4594629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the meteor girls work their way through their respective issues</p>
            </blockquote>





	before you start to hate yourself

**Author's Note:**

> this work is partly inspired by tumblr user wintercourse's amazing fanfic here: http://wintercourse.tumblr.com/post/126658555791/lesbian-meteor-shitfic so please go give it a read

you breathe.  
in and out, the movement rustling some nearby wrappers. you are lying in rose’s bed, the bed which she has been forced to share. it has been a few hours, you think, but you were always better at reading people than clocks. you think of a good blind joke and chuckle to yourself, saving it for later. the swell of your stomach is slightly calming to see, as it fills and deflates- the faygo bottles littered around you less so. the girls had kept a pretty close eye on you, but sometimes in the quietest hours of the day or the night you still heard him. there are many vents throughout the meteor, and he seems to know which ones you frequent. 

you think about something else. you were always very good at being patient, lying very still until you could seize your prey. the trick was that they had to think they were seizing you. these thoughts do not do very much to comfort you. instead, you turn your gaze to the ceiling, and count the constellations. rose had taught you the shapes for all of the symbols, the correct way the stars lined up to create your likenesses. kanaya, of course, had fell even more in love with rose, and you had observed. you continue looking at the stars, and remember kanaya climbing into bed with you when the lights had been turned off and the generators whirring was the only sound for miles. she must have thought you were rose, but she stayed, and you had held her hand. you hadn’t talked about it the next morning, but she began smiling at you more.  
her form had been wrapped so closely by the blankets, and she was calm.  
to satisfy some troll curioisty, you had wanted to ask her how it had felt killing someone, but you had reconsidered.  
you already knew how. 

in, and out. the sound makes a shooshing noise and you sob despite yourself. in spite of yourself.  
you hear footsteps, and wonder which one it will be. dave had stopped visiting, after you had stopped responding to him.  
you still see his blood when you close your eyes, its red mixing hues with cerulean, a terrible and familiar combination. karkat, perhaps, but you doubted he would want to see his expectations of you so brutally denied. your breath tastes slightly stale, and you suck it in.  
how long had it been since you had left this bed?  
(how long had it been since you had unsheathed your sword and thought about gliding it into her, her blood and organs as smooth as butter.)  
you retract your previous statement, the formality of the phrasing tingling old joys within you.  
you knew exactly how much time had passed since then. you could count it to the minute.  
some part of you had kept count, just like the part of you that had counted the possible endings for that day. heads or tails, terezi. a fifty/fifty chance isn't bad. it doesn't matter, anyway, nothing matters, luck doesn't matter.  
the glow from the ceiling blurs slightly, and your vision alters. it had been many weeks since that day, the exact time whispered to you through vents, as if your mind was not strong enough to remember the ebb and flow of clocks.  
you don’t question how he knows.

the door creaks open and you see blueberry blood and curl up into yourself. your instincts tell you that if you can’t see them, they can definitely see you and will consequently stab you in however many ways they can think of, but ignoring your instincts is growing easier.  
vriska sits down at the end of the bed, and the mattress leans in, slightly. you can hear her silent appraisal of the surface, and you do a mental tally. before you can remember the correct curvatures of the bottles around you, vriska flops down beside you and yawns dramatically. distantly, you hear her brushing away some of the wrappers so she can move closer to you, and you lift the blankets off your eyes.  
“wow, terezi! you would not _believe_ how boring karkat’s dumb meetings are!”  
the emphasis on her words is so nostalgic you want to cry, but you carry out your predetermined conversation.  
“how boring?” you ask, waiting.  
_“soooooooo_ boring!!” she grins, and you can see a bit of grubflake stuck in her upper right fang. her lipstick has smudged slightly, probably from her dining table etiquette. she rolls on top of you and you try not to act suspicious.  
“and guess what rose said?” she smiles, swirling the name around like one of your favourite lollies. absently, you almost reach for another, before she throws her head forward and her hair cascades around you, falling down as gently as a meteor. 

the dim light filters in through the strands of her hair, and she is leaning over you, half sitting up and half lying down. all you can see is her and her gloriously tangled mane, and it hurts so much you want to laugh. your throat swallows any sound you may have made, however, as vriska spins a web of the insincere concern rose showed for vriska, and her suggestion of human hair conditioner to ease the combing. vriska had then asked what a comb was, and her eyes lit up over me as she related rose’s expression.  
“anyway, it is probably time i tame it a little! i mean, if only to stop her from nagging me about it. she is pretty incessant! i don’t know how kanaya can deal with it.”  
you taste her excitement in the air, and hope it is fake. it would be kinder.

you lean upwards, and she leans backwards, mirroring your movements. as you follow, she coaxes you out of the blanket and passes you a brush that she had conveniently stored nearby. you grab the handle, marvel slightly at the dusty surface, and start hacking away at vriska’s hair obediently. she makes sure to complain eighty-eight percent of the time, and as you straighten her mess of curls, you note more awry things with her appearance. you drop the brush on the quilt beside you, and reach your hand towards her eye, gently brushing away the sleep crusting over. she grabs your hand with her own, and drags it to her cheek. she presses into you, and some deep part of you aches.  
you wonder if she had begun damaging herself for you to pick up the pieces, and an intense pity reverberates through you. she doesn’t kiss you, and you don’t kiss her, but it feels more intimate, almost. she holds your hand to her face for a few more minutes, content to simply wait.  
this is usually how her visits are spent, before she leaves you with a sense of productivity, taking with her as many bottles as she can pick up. it is usually too much for her to carry, and when she drops some on her way out, their plastic clanking against the cement tiles, you laugh so loud that she drops more. 

the next day you sneak into rose’s replacement room, the one she took when you began claiming hers, and lift open her blankets to crawl inside. she merely looks at you with one eye creaking open and then closing, and wraps an arm around your waist.  
“i presume you decided to skip karkat’s meeting today?”  
you give a great big lick to her cheek, shaking off the feeling of disingenuity, and she looks at you as if she knows.  
“why don’t you join me? you look like you have a thing for bad girls, anyway,” and you tilt your eyebrow just so that she laughs, before she reminds you of kanaya's moral highground.

she seems to remember exactly at the same time you do, and although neither of you were present at the time, vriska had related it to you in precise detail. kanaya never told you herself, but you noticed that she held herself differently. eridan’s was not the only heart she had split down the middle that night.  
“it’s always a good idea to have someone who knows how to wash blood out of fabric, anyway," you finish, skirting around sensitive topics.  
she concurs, and the two of you stare down at each other for a few seconds. she can smell the faygo on your breath, and you know that there is a glass bottle under her bed.  
neither of you say a word.

a door slams nearby and rose doesn’t flinch, her face remaining as serene as ever. her eyes, however, slip towards the undersides of her new bed, and both of your thoughts go towards her lusus. you toss her a bone and change the unspoken topic to something more tangible.  
“want to guess who broke up the happy couple?” you say, before you realise that one half of them is lying beside you, and she stares at you as if she is the blind one.  
both of you fall silent again, in favour of eavesdropping on the potential argument between the mystery pair, but the absence of angry footsteps causes hesitation.  
rose’s rubbed off black lipstick quirks upwards into an attempt at a smile, as she says, “perhaps one of them was slammed into the door, instead.”  
you try not to think of the implications.

when you hear a quiet moan, however, both you and rose recognise the musical tone and thus the perpetrators of the scandal. she freezes next to you, and you lean your neck towards her, noticing the nightlight in the wall socket instead. kanaya must have slept in this bed, once. maybe many times, you amend, looking at rose’s face and her absolute stillness. you look at her for a moment, before cupping a hand over your mouth and shouting louder than you had for weeks, _“get a room!”_ the scampering of steps nearly makes it satisfying. it certainly breaks the tension, and rose entwines a hand with yours as a thank you, and grips your fingers tightly as a threat.  
the day after, when you toss and turn out of sleep and out of rose’s arms, you don’t mention it. it seems many of your nights must be purposefully forgotten when you wake up the next day. you can still smell vriska on you, as you lie down in a cesspool of lingering scents and colours, the purple and blue berries and the lush green leaves swirling around you teasingly. you have found a new bed to lay in.

kanaya is next, you think, and you wait as long as it will take for her practical shoes to click clack into another borrowed room. when she does, you are no longer aware of how much time has passed. his whispers are not missed. you consider that the vents do not reach this room, or the possibility that someone is keeping him busy, but you doubt it. maybe you slept. you reason it is not much different to the majority of your waking hours, anyway. you rolls over, and adjust to your new position.  
“hello terezi,” she says, and you see that she has brought with her a plethora of activities. this a quite an amateur technique, you think, until you realise that all of her bundles of fabric and magazines are intended for her alone. she sits on the floor, her skirt spreading across her knees and thighs until it drops down in waves, enveloping the space around her. she pulls out a very fancy pair of scissors, and her ease with snipping the fabric suggests her preferred murder weapon. looking back at her previous choice, you notice a correlation between beauty and violence. the feminine bullet of lipstick shifting into a whirling mess of wires and teeth. you wonder what she considers beastly, if she can not separate them in her mind, and whether her attraction to others lies in their danger.

you smile, showing all of your teeth. she glances at you briefly, and her returning twist of the lips suggests that not only was she unperturbed, but that she believes she could crush you into a fine dust if she so wished.  
you smile even wider.  
you lose track of time again, and are beginning to roll your hand towards to bottom of the mattress, over the ripples of the sheet to find rose’s collection of regrets. kanaya stands up before you can, and announces that she is bored and would like to try alchemizing some more plants. the lack of sun often kills them, but when kanaya sits next to her and turns on her light, they grow healthy and strong.  
she must leave them eventually, though, and the sad scent of death lines each corridor.  
she invites you to join her, as she always does. sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t, and she leaves you to decompose in someone else's bed. today you push your torso forward, your stomach folding down like fabric and causing creases across your hips. your head goes next, dipping your neck low, until the rest of your body follows like some reptilian mammal. rose said her cat used to do something like that, but vriska insisted it was dragon-like. (forgive me for my ignorance of the extraordinary diversity of your species’ wildlife, terezi, rose had bowed, mocking in her sincerity. i believe it twas my human ignorance that led me astray.) kanaya watches, and hands you your dragon cape as you both walk out of the room. when you pull the hood down over your forehead, it appears she has modified the cloth slightly, and the cool rustle of the inner lining is calming even in its strangeness. 

(that night, you hear soft noises from rose’s new room, evidence of her migration away from you. instead of shoving the pillow over your ears, you swing out of bed and find vriska in the corridors, walking towards your makeshift room. you stand for a moment, breathing in unison until another sound echoes out and you pin her against the wall.)

rose and kanaya are not seen for the next few days, and you hope bitterly it is out of guilt.  
you slink back towards the vents, but even he seems to have found another pursuit. sometimes you think he is just staring from above, too far away to pick up with your weak senses. if he can always see you, hear you. you wonder if he is laughing at your desperation.  
you lie down in front of the barred opening of another vent (the term gateway drug springs to mind, and the rose in your subconscious laughs) and declare that you have found your new home.  
it is vriska who scoops you up and carries you back to whichever room you last owned. all of them, maybe, although you think the correct answer is none of them.  
you tick off another failure in your hand, and keep count of a second growing tally.  
when vriska helps you into the shower, and cleans the floor and vent grime off of your skin, you want to cry at how confused you are. you want to bite her for making you feel so inadequate, shove her again and show her what you’re really made of, but you also want to hide away from her, and let the wounds fester. (you also want to kiss her again, but once again you decide not to mention it.)  
after she cleans and dries you, she picks out the most ridiculous clothes that she had alchemized, bright rainbow socks and green shorts and purple stockings and blue dresses, and sets them out for you to choose from. its the most beautiful assortment of colours you’ve ever seen, and with a dramatic swing of your arm, you grab each garment and throw them on. she groans, but her hand is covering her smile, and you put your hands on your hips in mock confidence. she wolf whistles you, and adds in a few hoots for good measure, until she wheels you out of the room and into kanaya’s room.

you don’t remember the last time you went into kanaya’s room, actually, but when you step in you are positive that it’s hers. despite the perpetual dark atmosphere of the meteor, her walls and ceiling are lit up with the bare intestines of the cosmos, the dreadful infinities of space and the amazing swirls of the stars in all their magnificence. rose and kanaya are already sitting on the bed, all cross legged and entangled limbs, and vriska guides you to join them. she closes the door behind her, and steps into the private universe kanaya had created, her glow casting shadows across rose’s damn smug face.

it is rose who reaches for you, and before you can snarkily comment on her smooth moves, she is kissing your cheeks, your forehead, your eyelids and the corners of your lips. you are suddenly very grateful for the darkness, as you believe your blush would rather ruin your intended nonchalance. rose lingers just outside your lips, and vriska leans over and slightly pushes her onto you, laughing all the while. kanaya even giggles as rose falls over you, and the four of you become even more entangled. before you are allowed to continue tasting her bubblegum lips, rose leans back, waiting, and as if on cue kanaya speaks.  
“of course, we will have to write down some boundaries, a rulebook if you will. just to ensure everyone gets exactly what they want out of the situation.”  
vriska laughs and pulls kanaya’s face to her own, and everything you ever thought you knew about quadrants just flew out the window. you and rose watch for a moment, but then just lie back and stare at the galaxy around you, until vriska and kanaya collapse onto both of you and the four of you laugh out of sheer joy.

(it’s not perfect. it is not the antidote to any of your problems, and you and rose both still reach for bottles, sometimes, and vriska feels phantom pains, whispering that she deserved blood and arms and death and that she deserved everything, and kanaya still wakes up shaking with nightmares, crying out for a sun that had forsaken her. but it gets better.)


End file.
